ARTCOURT Gallery is pleased to present Yoon Heechang’s exhibition, At the Water’s Edge.

Entering a space in which Yoon has carefully arranged his works and seeking to decipher it, viewers must remain open yet prepared.
What exactly must they prepare themselves to encounter? Perhaps it is the finely honed sensibility confined within the space.
Yoon’s paintings, created using sand as a drawing medium, possess the stillness of a surface of water undisturbed by even a single ripple. White ceramic sculptures with subdued individual character extend from the interior into the courtyard, lending the space a sense of depth.

Yoon is an artist who creates rectangular ceramic forms and quietly arranges them within a space. He also produces paintings using kiln-fired sand as his drawing medium.
Yoon walks along the water’s edge, traversing unfamiliar landscapes. Through this peripatetic practice, Yoon embodies the concept behind the works he calls ceramic-powder paintings and gathers the sand, which, once processed, serves as their drawing medium.
The sand used in the works presented in this exhibition was gathered from sites as far away as the River Thames in England and, in Japan, from Kyoto’s Kamo River, the Seto Inland Sea, the Ibo River in Yoon’s native Hyogo Prefecture, and the Okawa River (formerly Yodo River), which flows directly in front of the ARTCOURT Gallery. The Okawa can be traced upstream to three separate rivers. Yoon trekked to the source of each to gather sand. In a process that resembles scientific analysis, Yoon sieves, sorts, and fires the sand at a range of temperatures. It is then ground with a mortar and pestle into ceramic powder. The process naturally brings out subtle variations in color, yielding a palette of pigments entirely Yoon’s own.
Yoon’s practice begins with losing himself in the act of walking along the water’s edge. He carries out each subsequent stage meticulously, but once his brush touches the support, he must complete the painting in one sustained, decisive effort. This is no ordinary paint: it permits neither overpainting nor reworking.

Last summer, Yoon participated in Picturesque Pottery: Ceramics Enjoying Art from Mingei to the Present at the Panasonic Shiodome Museum of Art. Alongside his works, he presented small bags containing handmade pigments prepared from sand gathered at different locations. Using his distinctive process, he had fired and ground each batch of sand to an even, powdery consistency. The bags were labeled by place of origin and arranged like swatches in a color sample book. The exhibition thus presented not only the works themselves but also a record of the artist’s actions, which, like the works, invited contemplation. Yoon’s actions—walking along the water’s edge, gathering sand, and turning it into ceramic powder—crystallized into a visible form.
This current exhibition brings together approximately ten paintings and ten ceramic sculptures, alongside kiln-fired sand gathered from twelve sites along the River Thames and six sites along the Yodo River.



| Artist Statement |

At the Water’s Edge


At the edge of the flowing Okawa, the work takes form.

The gallery’s exhibition rooms form a cloister-like sequence around the courtyard.
The arrangement of ceramic-powder paintings and ceramic forms on the floors, on the walls, and where the two meet, unfolds along the viewer’s path through the rooms.
The works move in and out of sight as one takes in the space. Through the eyes and with the body.

The sequence of rooms surrounding the courtyard converges with currents of ceramic forms and the ceramic-powder paintings; together, they compose three spatial layers.
Each remains independent yet exists in relation to one another.
What do their layered relations reveal?

When the shimmer of the Okawa’s surface comes into view from within the gallery, the viewer standing before the works is drawn out into the courtyard and onward, as though carried by the current, toward some distant river and places yet to be traversed.
Such is my reverie.


Yoon Heechang


* The Okawa, which flows in front of ARTCOURT Gallery, follows the former course of the Yodo River, which was diverted into its present course.